Advances in artificial intelligence and automation could replace as many as half the nation’s financial services workers over the next decade, industry experts say, but it’s going to take a big investment to make that happen.

James D’Arezzo, CEO of Glendale-based Condusiv Technologies, says that’s where things are headed. And the process will be complicated.

“Unless banks deal with the performance issues that AI will cause for ultra-large databases, they will not be able to take the money gained by eliminating positions and spend it on the new services and products they will need in order to stay competitive,” he said.

Intensive hardware upgrades are often cited as an answer to the problem, but D’Arezzo said that’s prohibitively expensive. He cited a recent announcement from the Tokyo Institute of Technology Global Scientific and Computing Center as an example.

The center is developing a supercomputer to meet the demands of artificial intelligence and big data applications. But existing supercomputers tend to cost anywhere from $50 million to several hundred million dollars, he said, which negates the cost-reduction advantages of AI technology.